Red Rising

Title: Red Rising

Series: Red Rising Trilogy - book 1

Author: Pierce Brown

Rating: 5 stars

Genre: Science Fiction

Number of Pages: 382

Publication Date: 2014

Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton

Summary: The Earth is dying. Darrow is a Red, a miner in the interior of Mars. His mission is to extract enough precious elements to one day tame the surface of the planet and allow humans to live on it. The Red are humanity's last hope.

Or so it appears, until the day Darrow discovers it's all a lie. That Mars has been habitable - and inhabited - for generations, by a class of people calling themselves the Golds. A class of people who look down on Darrow and his fellows as slave labour, to be exploited and worked to death without a second thought.

Until the day Darrow, with the help of a mysterious group of rebels, disguises himself as a Gold and infiltrates their command school, intent on taking down his oppressors from the inside. But the command school is a battlefield - and Darrow isn't the only student with an agenda.

Red Rising was not what I expected. When I first heard about this book I was intrigued but was not expecting to be amazed. I figured that this was just another book in which the repressed attempt to overthrow those that are the oppressors. Instead I was faced with a book that does this while also pointing out the faults in human nature and looking deep in to the mind of what fundamentally makes a person who they are.

Red Rising follows 17 year old Darrow, a Red, a miner of Mars, attempting to make Mars inhabitable as Earth's resources dye out. But then Darrow discovers that Mars has had people living on it for hundreds of years, and his life has been a lie - he is nothing more than a slave to the system. Following the execution of his wife, Eo, Darrow finds himself involved with a group of rebels who want him to help take the Golds down from the inside by pretending to be one of them after some intensive transformations.

The characters that Pierce Brown has created are perhaps some of the most well thought out and in depth characters that I have ever met, even if you only see them for a page or two. Each character has got a clear back story that influences their decisions and actions in the book while not coming across as an over bearing backlog of information.

The characters also balance with the story line of this book. There is nothing worse than when you get stuck with a character who doesn't quite mesh with the plot. The characters of Red Rising always have a purpose, no character is just there to fill in space. Each character is there to show you the fundamentals of who the Golds are as a group or to teach the reader some detail about the plot.

But be warned this book can be incredible dark and gruesome at times. When I read the summary and it said that school was a battlefield, I must admit I figured it was the kind of battlefield where people try to out play each other mentally...in reality, it's a battlefield...as in the kind where people slaughter each other or risk being slaughtered themselves. Yet despite this the book is still absolutely amazing.

This book gets an easy 5 stars.

Vertigo - TBR Challenge

For my August TBR Challenge I had to read a story that is published on Wattpad or Fictionpress. For my challenge I ended up reading Vertigo by Carmel March. I always love it when you find a gem on these websites, that one story that reminds you why keep looking and reading all the different works that people have created. 

Vertigo is one of those gems. The story follows a team of CIA agents who are trying to prevent an arms dealer from causing some major damage. Gemma Hart is the protagonist in this story, she is a smart and talented CIA agent who is pushed to her limits and forced to rise to the challenge when she is pulled from logistics and into the field. Facing not only trouble at a national security level, but also problems with her civilian boyfriends parents...and then there is the fact that she may or may not be developing a close relationship with her CIA partner, Boone.

One of the main things that I liked about this story was that the characters were real. Sure these agents are kickbutt, but at the end of the day you don't end up saying: "if only you could do that in real life" which many of these more action based (and movies) stories tend to go towards. 

The action in this story was another thing that I really loved. The action didn't dominate the plot line, it complimented the story as it was needed. The romance was another factor that I liked in the story for the same reason. Once again it seemed to fit seamlessly into the story without taking over the plot line and throwing it out the window. Everything in this story was one wonderfully woven flow of words.

To add to this amazing story is a sequel: Ricochet. Ricochet is still in the process of being written but Carmel March gets a new chapter up each month.

To this amazing little gem I give it a solid 4.5 stars and I can't wait for the September update.

All the Bright Places

Title: All the Bright Places

Author: Jennifer Niven

Rating: 5 stars

Genre: Young Adult

Number of Pages: 378

Publication Date: 2015

Publisher: Penguin

Summary: Theodore Finch wants to take his own life. Violet Markey is devastated by her sister's death. They meet on the ledge of the school bell tower, and so their story begins. It's only together they can be themselves. But as Violet's world grows, Finch's begins to shrink. How far will Violet go to save the boy she has come to love?

All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven is perhaps one of the most incredible books I have ever read. There is nothing better than when you pick up a book and it completely moves you...that it consumes your thoughts and makes you think. This is exactly what this book does. It fact I was stumped for days on how to describe this book. Conversations by me went a little something like this: "Have you read All the Bright Places? No, well you should its...I mean its just..." Words cannot describe the true incredibleness of this book.

The best way I can give a summary of this book is by saying that this is a story about "a boy called Finch and a girl named Violet."

To be honest you really don't need to know any more than that. In fact the less you know going in, probably the better.

The writing in this book is beautiful and moving, it draws you in and doesn't let you go until well past the last page. It will give you warm fuzzy feelings, make you role your eyes, laugh, and it will make you cry.

I'm not a fan of contemporary novels, I hate how they reflect that reality can suck - and lets face all books have something go wrong in them at some point, its what makes the story. At least when something goes wrong in a fantasy its usually because of magic or some other uncontrollable factor, not someones stupidity. I have little patients for self inflected stupidity; it makes me cringe.

All the Bright Places manages a work around this. Bad things happen, put thankfully for a change of contemporary pace, its not because one of the characters makes a poor decision based on an inability to let go of the past (some serious contemporary generalisation - but you get the drift); instead the bad stuff happens because the characters are trying do the right thing in a bad situation. That and there was no angst which I loved.

If there was a book that I could erase from my mind so I could re-read it, it would be this one. This book is not just a story but it is a piece of art. If I could give this book more than my 5 star rating I would, but I can't...so I reluctantly give it 5 stars because it deserves so much more.

Ruby Red

Title: Ruby Red

Series: Precious Stone Trilogy - book 1

Author: Kerstin Gier (Anthea Bell - translator)

Rating: 4 stars

Genre: Young Adult, Science Fiction

Number of Pages: 322

Publication Date: 2011 (first published 2009)

Publisher: Square Fish

Summary: Sixteen-year-old Gwen lives with her extended - and rather eccentric - family in an exclusive London neighborhood. In spite of her ancestors' peculiar history, she's had a relatively normal life so far. The time-travelling gene that runs like a secret thread through the female half of the family is supposed to have skipped over Gwen, so she hasn't been introduced to 'the mysteries,' and can spend her time hanging out with her best friend, Lesley. It comes as an unwelcome surprise when she starts taking sudden, uncontrolled leaps into the past.

She's totally unprepared for time travel, not to mention all that comes with it: fancy clothes, archaic manners, a mysterious secret society, and Gideon, her time-traveling counterpart. He's obnoxious, a know-it-all, and possibly the best looking guy she's seen in any century...

The main thing I loved about this book was its take on time travel. I don't know about you, but I suck at physics and things like time travel and the effects that the past has on the future, has always left me infuriatingly confused! Thankfully this book managed to give some detail on how time travel worked without me wanting to throw the book across the room. Kerstin hit the amount of detail needed right on the head; simple is good!

My other main love about this book was how normal Gwen was. As much as I love it when characters are gifted with one or two extraordinary talents, I actually loved the fact that Gwen was the most average, normal teenage girl ever! She enjoys hanging out with her friends, watching movies, spending time with her slightly crazy family; the whole ability to time travel, not something she has ever thought she would have, nor particularly wanted. Although I think she may have slightly enjoyed taking her phone into the past and taking pictures for her best friend. But shhh! don't tell the crazy secret society guys!

As for the character's in this book, they were the quirky and loveable kind. Some more detail on a few of the more major characters would have been nice, but I feel like that is something that will be flushed out a bit more in the next book

This book was fun to read, and it was refreshing and unique. I did find a few points dragged a bit and I would loved to have learnt just something about this big secret in the first book, but oh well, you can't have everything. I'm really excited to pick up the second and third books of this trilogy.

I kind of wish I could read German, because I'm really curious as to how the translated version stacks up next to the original. Also this book has been made into a film, a German film, I should probably say! However, there are both English dubbed and subbed versions to found if you look hard enough.

I'm giving this book 4 stars.